Mary Anne Evans — (George Eliot) 1819-1880
Harper’s Magazine , 1881.
“In more than one striking passage in his novels Mr. Hardy has recognised the fact that the beauty of the future, as the race is more developed in intellect, cannot be the mere physical beauty of the past; and in one of the most remarkable he says that ‘ideal physical beauty is incompatible with mental development, and a full recognition of the evil of things. Mental luminousness must be fed with the oil of life, even though there is already a physical need for it.’ And this was the case with George Eliot. The face was one of a group of four, not all equally like each other, but all of the same spiritual family, and with a curious interdependance of likeness. These four are Dante, Savonarola, Cardinal Newman, and herself.... In the group of which George Eliot was one there is the same straight wall of brow; the droop of the powerful nose; mobile lips, touched with strong passion, kept resolutely under control; a square jaw, which would make the face stern, were it not counteracted by the sweet smile of lip and eye.... The two or three portraits that exist, though valuable, give but a very imperfect presentiment. The mere shape of the head would be the despair of any painter. It was so grand and massive that it would scarcely be possible to represent it without giving the idea of disproportion to the frame of which no one ever thought for a moment when they saw her, although it was a surprise, when she stood up, to see that after all, she was but a little fragile woman who bore this weight of brow and brain.”
The Century , 1881.
“Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,—all these seemed the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise benignant soul. But it was the voice which best revealed her, a voice whose subdued intensity and tremulous richness seemed to environ her uttered words with the mystery of a work of feeling that must remain untold.... And then again, when in moments of more intimate converse some current of emotion would set strongly through her soul, when she would raise her head in unconscious absorption and look out into the unseen, her expression was not one to be soon forgotten. It had not, indeed, the serene felicity of souls to whose child-like confidence all heaven and earth are fair. Rather it was the look (if I may use a platonic phrase) of a strenuous Demiurge, of a soul on which high tasks are laid, and which finds in their accomplishment its only imagination of joy.”
William Morgan’s George Eliot . *
“I was disappointed when I found the illustrated papers gave no portraits of George Eliot, and I afterwards learned that, celebrated as she is in other ways, she enjoys the rare, and perhaps unique, distinction that she was never photographed. Two portraits of her are, however, in existence. One, by Mr. Lawrence, hangs in Mr. Blackwood’s drawing-room in Edinburgh; the other, by Mr. Buxton, was in her own house at Chelsea. She is described as a woman of large, massive, and homely features, which were softened and irradiated by a gracious and winning smile. The size, shape, and poise of her head were very noticeable, and some of her friends have been struck by her resemblance to the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommea. Her voice was rich and melodious, and those who best knew her speak of her as a strangely fascinating and sympathetic woman, who left on every one who approached her an impression of goodness and greatness. Her conversation had no traces of the rich humour which runs through some of her writings, but she joined very heartily in the jocularity of others.”